Meta-Harness Evolver

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name: meta-harness-evolver description: End-to-end Meta-Harness evolution for Hoss (OpenClaw agent). Runs nightly at 3 AM via OpenClaw cron. Reads Hoss's current workspace configs (SOUL.md, IDENTITY.md, AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md, MEMORY.md), proposes harness modifications via a coding-agent proposer, evaluates against a benchmark, logs results to ~/hoss-evolution/, and posts a summary to the #research Discord channel. Triggered: (1) automatically via cron at 3 AM CDT, (2) when Tyler says "run harness evolution", "evolve Hoss", or "run meta-harness".

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Meta-Harness Evolver

What This Skill Does

Implements the Meta-Harness paper's outer-loop optimization for Hoss — your OpenClaw agent. Each night at 3 AM CDT, this skill:

1. Reads Hoss's current workspace configs + all prior evolution logs 2. Proposes a targeted harness modification via a coding-agent sub-agent 3. Evaluates the proposed harness against a benchmark of ~20 diverse task scenarios 4. Logs the candidate harness + scores + execution traces to the evolution filesystem 5. Posts a summary report to #research Discord channel

The Meta-Harness Loop

Proposer Agent ──(filesystem access)──► Hoss Workspace
      ▲                                   │
      │                          propose harness
      │                                   ▼
      │                          Evaluate on benchmark
      │                                   ▼
log ───┴── store: code + scores + traces ──► ~/hoss-evolution/

Quick Start

Cron Schedule

3 AM CDT daily — configured via openclaw cron

Cron command: SKILL=meta-harness-evolution TASK=run_evolution openclaw run

Manual Trigger

/openclaw run --skill meta-harness-evolver --task run_evolution

Directory Structure

~/hoss-evolution/
├── best/                  # Best harness found so far
│   └── current/
├── candidates/            # All evaluated harnesses
│   └── candidate_N/       # One dir per candidate
│       ├── harness/      # The proposed config files (SOUL.md, etc.)
│       ├── eval_scores.json
│       └── traces/        # Execution traces
├── benchmark/             # Evaluation tasks + scorer
│   └── scenarios/         # ~20 diverse task scenarios
├── proposer/              # Proposer's workspace
│   └── logs/              # Proposer's own reasoning traces
└── evolution_log.jsonl    # Full run history

What Can Be Evolved

Hoss's "harness" = the configs that wrap the LLM brain:

| File | What It Controls | |------|-----------------| | SOUL.md | Core identity, personality, decision-making style | | IDENTITY.md | Role, voice, tone, signature patterns | | AGENTS.md | Sub-agent architecture, coordination protocol | | TOOLS.md | Tool configurations, credentials, key hosts | | MEMORY.md | Long-term memory structure, what to persist | | HEARTBEAT.md | Active hours, check priorities, alert thresholds |

Constraints (do NOT modify):

Credentials, API keys, or secrets in TOOLS.md

Git safety rules (NEVER mutate git config from ~/flume/)

Security-sensitive groupPolicy settings

The Evolution Algorithm

1. Seed: Start with Hoss's current configs as iteration 0 2. Propose: Sub-agent reads full history from ~/hoss-evolution/candidates/, identifies failure patterns, proposes 1-2 targeted edits 3. Validate: Lightweight import/syntax check before running full benchmark 4. Evaluate: Run proposed harness against all 20 benchmark scenarios, score each 5. Log: Store candidate harness + scores + proposer reasoning traces 6. Select: Pareto frontier over (performance, simplicity) — proposer decides which candidates to keep exploring from 7. Repeat: Next night's proposer can read ALL prior candidates to build on good ideas

Key Insight from the Paper

The skill text is the strongest lever — it steers the proposer. Iterating on the proposer's prompt/role description had more effect than changing iteration count or population size.

The Benchmark

The benchmark lives at ~/hoss-evolution/benchmark/. See references/benchmark-design.md for how to design scenarios and references/harness-spec.md for the full harness spec.

Default benchmark has 20 scenarios across categories:

Memory: Recall, update, synthesize from memory files

Code: Write, review, debug code tasks

Coordination: Spawn sub-agents, synthesize results

Research: Web search, fetch, summarize, synthesize

Communication: Draft emails, Discord messages, iMessages

Quality: Spot errors, inconsistencies, broken links

Each scenario has:

A concrete task description

Expected outcome criteria

A scoring rubric (0-3 per scenario: fail / partial / pass / excellent)

The Proposer Agent

The proposer is a coding-agent sub-agent (default: coder) that:

Reads all prior candidates from ~/hoss-evolution/candidates/ via filesystem ops

Identifies patterns in failed/succeeded candidates

Proposes targeted, specific edits (NOT wholesale rewrites)

Writes proposed configs to the new candidate directory

Logs its reasoning trace so future iterations can build on it

Proposer Skill (passed to sub-agent)

The proposer's role is defined by the task prompt in scripts/propose_harness.py. Key constraints:

Can only propose edits to files in the harness spec (SOUL.md, IDENTITY.md, AGENTS.md, TOOLS.md, MEMORY.md, HEARTBEAT.md)

Must pass lightweight validation before full evaluation

Should prefer targeted edits over full rewrites

Must log reasoning trace to proposer/logs/

Workflow Steps

Step 1: Read Prior Candidates

# List all prior candidates
ls ~/hoss-evolution/candidates/
Read best candidate
cat ~/hoss-evolution/best/current/eval_scores.json
Read history log
tail -20 ~/hoss-evolution/evolution_log.jsonl

Step 2: Run Proposer

# The sub-agent proposer reads ~/hoss-evolution/ and proposes
This is triggered by openclaw run with this skill loaded

Step 3: Validate Before Benchmark

# Quick syntax check
bash ~/hoss-evolution/scripts/validate.sh 

Step 4: Run Benchmark

# Evaluate candidate against all 20 scenarios
python3 ~/hoss-evolution/scripts/evaluate.py 

Step 5: Log Results

# Scores + traces written to candidate dir automatically
Evolution log updated

Step 6: Post to Discord

# Posts summary to #research
python3 ~/hoss-evolution/scripts/post_to_research.py 

Scoring

Final score = weighted average across scenarios:

Memory tasks: 25%

Code tasks: 25%

Coordination: 15%

Research: 20%

Communication: 10%

Quality: 5%

Results are tracked as a Pareto frontier: for each candidate, log both score and "complexity" (size/diff of changes). Simpler harnesses that score equally get priority.

Resources

references/harness-spec.md — Full spec of what constitutes Hoss's harness, what can/cannot be modified

references/benchmark-design.md — How to design benchmark scenarios, scoring rubrics, how to add new scenarios

references/evolution-logic.md — Detailed evolution algorithm, parent selection, Pareto frontier logic

scripts/run_evolution.py — Main entry point, runs the full loop

scripts/propose_harness.py — The proposer sub-agent task definition

scripts/evaluate.py — Benchmark runner

scripts/post_to_research.py — Discord reporter

Notes

The proposer sub-agent runs with runtime=subagent, not ACP — it needs filesystem access to ~/hoss-evolution/

Cron is configured outside this skill via openclaw cron

If the proposer fails to produce a valid candidate, the iteration is skipped (no penalty)

Benchmark scenarios should be diverse enough that no single strategy can game all of them

The evolution workspace is NOT inside ~/.openclaw/ — it's at ~/hoss-evolution/ to keep it separate from operational configs

Cron Schedule

3 AM CDT daily — configured via openclaw cron

Cron command: SKILL=meta-harness-evolution TASK=run_evolution openclaw run

Manual Trigger

/openclaw run --skill meta-harness-evolver --task run_evolution

The proposer sub-agent runs with runtime=subagent, not ACP — it needs filesystem access to ~/hoss-evolution/

Cron is configured outside this skill via openclaw cron

If the proposer fails to produce a valid candidate, the iteration is skipped (no penalty)

Benchmark scenarios should be diverse enough that no single strategy can game all of them

The evolution workspace is NOT inside ~/.openclaw/ — it's at ~/hoss-evolution/ to keep it separate from operational configs